Customer-impacting service disruptions can cost enterprises revenue and reputation. As businesses progress towards digitalization, maintaining an excellent customer experience has become a critical measure of an organization’s digital transformation success. For digital service providers, this requires modern architectures and new expectations for the way engineers, customer teams and business leaders work together. Responsibility for the customer experience is extended to multiple teams across technology organizations.
xMatters recently released the results of its Incident Management in the Age of Customer-Centricity research study to better understand the range of various incident management practices and how the increased focus on customer experience has caused roles across an organization to evolve. The study asked the opinions of over 300 DevOps and IT Ops practitioners and business leaders from organizations of varying sizes, including midsize and enterprise-level businesses, delivering digital services.
Findings highlight the ongoing challenges organizations face as they continue to introduce and rapidly evolve digital services. The research also found the importance of intelligent, automated approaches to simultaneously reduce incidents and to limit their impact when they do arise.
Maintaining the Pace of Innovation and the Customer Experience
The research found a gap that needs to be closed if organizations hope to continuously innovate and maintain service performance and availability. More than half of respondents (54%) said their organization delivers at least one new software release per week and a full 77% of respondents said the number of releases has increased by at least 25% over the past three years.
Unfortunately, legacy technology and overburdened talent is straining to keep up. For example, 57% of organizations report their customers experience a degradation in digital experiences, ranging from minor performance issues to major outages, on a daily or weekly basis.
Nearly 75% of survey respondents say that their ability to build out new services is sometimes or always affected by customer-impacting issues. This gap between the demand for new services and the need to provide an always-on, superior customer experience must be solved if the dream of the digitalization of business is to be realized.
Inefficient Incident Management Slows the Pace of Innovation
The vast majority of survey respondents (91.7%) representing myriad roles said that delivering a superior customer experience is a priority for them.
Previously, IT Ops alone was the group most commonly identified as being responsible for enabling the customer experience. This shift is important, as now nearly everyone across a technology enterprise shoulders part of the load and much of their time is lost to problem triage and working toward eventual resolution.
According to the survey, nearly half of development team leads indicated their developers spend more than 50% of their time manually addressing incidents. Already a huge concern, this sunk time is only going to become more painful as the pace of innovation continues to quicken.
Automation Helps Streamline Incident Management
There is reason for optimism in the survey results, too. Findings indicate that the modernization of incident management practices, including the use of more advanced IT tools and services, will dramatically aid in resolving issues at a faster pace through automation and by equipping enterprise employees with the information and resources needed to support digital transformation.
The majority of DevOps/SRE practitioners (84%), IT Operations practitioners (73%) and Developers (65%) surveyed believe emerging technologies like AI and ML will further improve their job performance.
These new advancements in incident management will aid companies as they continue to deliver quality services at a higher rate of speed. While the gap between an organization’s ability to innovate and maintain uptime is revealing, the modernization of incident management will equip employees to better serve their customers with critical insights and allow them to focus on service innovation.
The Latest
Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020. Part 2 covers AIOps, AI and Machine Learning (ML) ...
As the New Year approaches, it is time for APMdigest's 10th annual list of Application Performance Management (APM) predictions. Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how APM and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2020 ...
Enterprises with services operating in the cloud are overspending by millions due to inefficiencies with their apps and runtime environments, according to a poll conducted by Lead to Market, and commissioned by Opsani. 69 Percent of respondents report regularly overspending on their cloud budget by 25 percent or more, leading to a loss of millions on unnecessary cloud spend ...
For IT professionals responsible for upgrading users to Windows 10, it's crunch time. End of regular support for Windows 7 is nearly here (January 14, 2020) but as many as 59% say that only a portion of their users have been migrated to Windows 10 ...
Application performance monitoring (APM) has become one of the key strategies adopted by IT teams and application owners in today’s era of digital business services. Application downtime has always been considered adverse to business productivity. But in today’s digital economy, what is becoming equally dreadful is application slowdown. When an application is slow, the end user’s experience accessing the application is negatively affected leaving a dent on the business in terms of commercial loss and brand damage ...
Useful digital transformation means altering or designing new business processes, and implementing them via the people and technology changes needed to support these new business processes ...
xMatters recently released the results of its Incident Management in the Age of Customer-Centricity research study to better understand the range of various incident management practices and how the increased focus on customer experience has caused roles across an organization to evolve. Findings highlight the ongoing challenges organizations face as they continue to introduce and rapidly evolve digital services ...
The new App Attention Index Report from AppDynamics finds that consumers are using an average 32 digital services every day — more than four times as many as they realize. What's more, their use of digital services has evolved from a conscious decision to carry around a device and use it for a specific task, to an unconscious and automated behavior — a digital reflex. So what does all this mean for the IT teams driving application performance on the backend? Bottom line: delivering seamless and world-class digital experiences is critical if businesses want to stay relevant and ensure long-term customer loyalty. Here are some key considerations for IT leaders and developers to consider ...
Through the adoption of agile technologies, financial firms can begin to use software to both operate more effectively and be faster to market with improvements for customer experiences. Making sure there is the necessary software in place to give customers frictionless everyday activities, like remote deposits, business overdraft services and wealth management, is key for a positive customer experience ...
